page_title: Bartlett and Robertson
section_title: Early life and marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Bartlett and Robertson / Early life and marriage
caption_attribution_description: English: Royal Academy of Music, University of London
context_page_description: Ethel Bartlett and Rae Robertson, popularly known as Bartlett and Robertson, were a husband-and-wife classical piano duo who were credited with popularising two-piano music in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s through their extensive touring, recordings, and radio performances. Of English and Scottish background respectively, Bartlett and Robertson met during their studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London and married in 1921. Although they initially pursued solo careers, they teamed up as duo-pianists in the late 1920s and conducted annual international tours for over two decades. Several major composers of their era wrote duo-piano compositions especially for them, including Sir Arnold Bax, Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, and the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů.
context_section_description: Ethel Agnes Bartlett was born in Epping Forest, England, on 6 June 1896. At age 10 her family moved to London. In 1915 she entered the Royal Academy of Music on an Associated Board Scholarship; her younger sister Edith was enrolled as a vocalist at the Academy. Bartlett studied under Frederick Moore and Tobias Matthay at the Academy, graduating in 1919. She also studied under Artur Schnabel in Berlin. In addition to piano, she played harpsichord and chamber music.
  John Rae Robertson was born in the village of Ardersier in the Scottish Highlands on 29 November 1893. He was the eighth of nine children in a minister's family. He showed an aptitude for piano playing at a very young age and began playing the organ at his father's church on Sundays at the age of five. He continued to study piano as a youth and as a student at the University of Edinburgh, where he completed his M.A. in Modern Languages. In September 1914 he began studying under Tobias Matthay at the Royal Academy of Music, but was drafted in January 1915 into the English army for World War I. He sustained an arm wound at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 and a hand wound at Ypres in 1917. In 1918 he received his army discharge and returned to the Royal Academy.
  He met Bartlett upon his return to the Academy, and the two were married in Marylebone, London, in September 1921.
caption: Royal Academy of Music, London
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